Jason Atkinson

Recovering Politician

I shot this Saturday and Sunday at Camp 584 and for those who’ve never seen a silver lab, meet Gunnel. This is only 4 minutes long and rest assured, for my big film, Why the Klamath Matters, we have a team of professionals.

Why the Klamath Matter’s Dr. Rick Schmidt called with a severe clear sky forecast so we jumped in his Helio Courier and flew from Crater Lake in Oregon to I-5 in California following the Klamath River.

This was only a test for the real shooters to get a feel for what we are up against when we take off the doors in a few months and shoot with our big cameras.

Marshall Brown speaks of the importance of The New Inlet for The Great South Bay’s health and recovery. In light of the brown tide The Great South Bay has seen subsequently, we should feel very fortunate that those who wanted to close it up shortly after Sandy did not prevail. The New Inlet is now The Great South Bay’s lifeline in what is now an even longer recovery.

500,000 Septic Tanks

The biggest contributor to pollution in The Great South Bay by far is seepage over decades from over 500,000 septic tanks in Nassau and Suffolk County. The increased nitrogen levels in the groundwater once that enters into the bay, helps to trigger massive algal blooms such as we have been seeing with growing regularity and intensity over the last 30 years in waters throughout Long Island. This septic seepage is also impacting our drinking water. Year by year, the contamination goes deeper into the aquifer. We drink now water 10,000 years old, trapped in the ground as the glaciers melted. If nothing is done, our water will be undrinkable within 20 years. Our bays and waterways will die well before that, however.

Save The Great South Bay, a non-profit organization founded in August 2012, is a local grassroots organization dedicated to the revitalization of the bay.

We want future generations to fish, clam and swim in these waters as we had. We want to restore marine and shoreline habitats so that the South Shore and beach communities that ring the bay can become sustainable for this century.

At present, we are at a moment of crisis. The water quality on Long Island is such that due to septic tank seepage, pesticides, storm runoff, and lawn and agricultural fertilizer, we may not have water to drink, bathe in and cook with before long. As our polluted ground water seeps into our aquifer, it also seeps into our rivers, bays and ponds, and it is killing our bodies of water at an accelerating pace, and the costs of over-development and poor infrastructure mount.

Science has both the diagnosis here and the cure. Save the Great South Bay relies greatly on the collective expertise of researchers from a variety of institutions, many of them in The Long Island Clean Water Coalition, a group formed to address this urgent problem of ground water pollution before it is literally too late.